All the Things We’ve Learned About Hillary Clinton’s Email Habits

The New York Timesreported on Monday that Hillary Clinton relied on a personal email address for government business while serving as Secretary of State. The emails were not preserved on official servers during her tenure; aides compiled the 55,000 pages of emails deemed pertinent to State Department business to be preserved as mandated by new Federal Records Act requirements only two months ago. The process used to determine which emails to send to the State Department is unknown, and many have pounced on the revelation as more proof of Clintonian secrecy. A Clinton spokesperson said that Hillary had complied with the “letter and spirit of therules.”

Here’s what we’ve learned since the newsbroke:

John Kerry is the first Secretary of State to rely on government email.As the New York Times pointed out, Colin Powell mentioned using personal email for Secretary of State business in his memoir. Other reports have shown that former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel also didn’t have an official email. Former EPA administration Lisa Jackson used two emails for official business. The House Oversight Committee had problems obtaining Bush staffer emails during an investigation because of private email usage. This story may be less a revelation of Clinton’s secrecy than the nightmare that is working at the National Archives and RecordsAdministration.

Hillary Clinton prefers other modes of communication.So reports Bloomberg Businessweek. A State Department spokesperson told reporters, “We have no indication that Secretary Clinton used her personal email account for anything but unclassified purposes. While Secretary Clinton did not have a classified email system, she did have multiple other ways of communicating in a classified manner (assistants printing documents for her, secure phone calls, secure videoconferences).”

Since Clinton’s BlackBerry was barred from many meetings and other functions, email was one of the worst ways of reaching her. Aides were basically her official emailaddress.

The personal emails were discovered by the House committee tasked with investigating the Benghazi attacks.Representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the select committee looking into the government’s handling of Benghazi, said the committee should “make them available to the American public so they can read their contents for themselves.” Representative Trey Gowdy, who chairs the select committee, said, “I am not going to make any emails public. She’s welcome to.” The House Oversight Committee, chaired by Representative Jason Chaffetz, has an interest in investigating the emailstoo.

Clinton’s personal email address has stopped at least one media organization from accessing her work correspondence.Gawker first reported on Clinton’s email address in 2013 and filed a FOIA request for all of the Secretary of State’s correspondence with former Clinton staffer Sidney Blumenthal — whose emails had been hacked by Guccifer — through her personal email address. (Officials have cited the fact that Clinton’s email remained safe during the Blumenthal hack as evidence that her personal email was no less secure than a government-issued one.) The State Department did not send Gawker any information, because it did not have the information reporters were looking for. Although Clinton’s spokespeople have argued that all of the former Secretary of State’s emails have been archived in the inboxes of government employees she corresponded with, Gawker argues this leaves out all the nongovernmental types she discussed her job with. Clinton’s personal address is no longer active — attempts to email her there are bouncedback.

At the time, the State Department would only let Clinton have one email address on her BlackBerry.Instead of having all her personal conversations saved of posterity — or having to carry two BlackBerries — State Department officials say Clinton chose to use a personal email for work and pleasure, according to reporting from Business Insider. The domain name that Clinton used for her email — clintonemail.com — was registered on the day her confirmation hearings began in the Senate, according to the Washington Post. Gawker reported on Tuesday night that other Clinton staffers may have used clintonemail.com. Erik Wemple, a media columnist at the Washington Post, published an email that Clinton spokesperson Philippe Reines — who appears not to have used a clintonemail.com address — sent to Gawker responding to their story. It involved the phrases, “your lying liar pants on fire source,” “your cockamamie theory,” “your creepy methods.” He sent another email to a larger group of reporters that added, “And believe me, I’d be far happier with you all having a field day poring through my largely boring and tedious email, than unfairly and erroneously reading that I intentionally undermined or circumvented theprocess.”

Clinton runs her own server for the clintonemail.com accounts. The server transmitting the clintonemail.com messages traced back to the Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York. According to the Associated Press, “operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over anyemails.”

Josh Earnest says that the White House has never been a fan of government officials using personal email addresses.“What I can tell you is that very specific guidance has been given to agencies all across the government, which is specifically that employees of the Obama administration should use their official email accounts when they’re conducting official government business,” the White House press secretary said on Tuesday. However, when there are situations where personal email accounts are used, “it is important for those records to be preserved consistent with the Federal RecordsAct.”

The regulations requiring Clinton to save emails weren’t in place until after she left the State Department.Michael Tomasky writes that “the new regs apparently weren’t fully implemented by State until a year and half after Clinton left State.” That may resolve many of the legal questions here, but it still doesn’t address the transparency concerns at the heart of the emailstory.

State Department IT experts apparently warned Clinton staffers that this was a bad idea.Someone who deals with cybersecurity at the State Department told Al Jazeera, “We told people in her office that it wasn’t a good idea. They were so uninterested that I doubt the secretary was everinformed.”

This news makes historians very sad.Legal historial Mary L. Dudziak told The Atlantic: “Hillary Clinton’s emails are the contemporary equivalent of letters and memos from past secretaries of state that have enabled historians to study the history of American foreign relations. By failing to retain her correspondence at the time it was produced, Secretary Clinton may have jeopardized preservation of a full and accurate historical record. This undermines the ability of scholars to assess her own legacy as secretary. This is mostunfortunate.”

Internet experts say that relying on a private company to handle official email was not smart.Motherboard talked to an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who said, “It strikes me as not particularly credible that in her entire tenure as Secretary of State, she never sent any classified material in any email ever,” responding to the State Department’s claims that she relied on other ways to access classified information. “And, if she ever did reference classified information in an email that wasn’t part of the classified email system, that’s the same level of mishandling classified documents, although to a different scale, than what we charged [Edward] Snowdenwith.”

Jeb Bush is the first, but probably not the last, person to chide Clinton’s email usage.Bush tweeted, “Transparency matters. Unclassified @HillaryClinton emails should be released.” He then gleefully links to the website where he has already released all the emails from his tenure as Floridagovernor.

From @presssec: new rules for reporters at WH press conferences.- one question per reporter, then yield floor and microphone.- followup question “may be permitted.” Then yield floor and microphone.- “failure to abide” may result in suspension/revocation” of WH press pass.

so, the conventional wisdom on election night was that democrats had not achieved the resounding repudiation of president trump they were looking for. yes, they’d won the house, but not overwhelmingly. and progressive favorites stacey abrams, andrew gillum, and beto o’rourke had gone down to defeat. meanwhile, republicans had made slight gains in the senate. a few days later, the thinking shifted in Democrats’ favor, as more late-breaking results came in from various states, especially california, which is notoriously slow at counting ballots, and where the party did extremely well. we’re not almost two weeks out from the election, enough time to look at things more dispassionately. how do you rate the performance now?

Trying to get away from the endless and interminable and redundant arguments over how to define a “wave.”

Benjamin Hart3:10 PM

yes, I agree, there is little more tedious than parsing what defines a wave

Ed Kilgore3:11 PM

Democrats won the House popular vote and picked up 37 or 38 seats. Dems won 22 of 34 Senate races (with one in Mississippi still to go), and by just about any measure, more Senate votes. And they picked up seven net governorship and seven state legislative chambers.

Part of the problem is that an insanely pro-GOP Senate landscape made a good Democratic performance look bad.

And the other problem was sky-high Democratic expectations, plus the overwhelming attention given to close races in Florida, Georgia and Texas.

Which all went Republican.

Benjamin Hart3:13 PM

yes, and the pressure to prematurely label the evening one way or another, which is endemic to election coverage (and which I don’t see going away any time soon)

the other thing, I think, is that trump is such an outlier of a person and president that some people view anything less than a sweeping rejection the likes of which we’ve never seen before as a bit of a letdown

Ed Kilgore3:14 PM

Yeah, the commentariat has not adjusted well to the slow counts that ever-increasing voting-by-mail plus provisional ballots have introduced.

As for Trump, I guess part of the polarization over him is that it’s hard for partisans to interpret anything that happens as anything other than total victory or defeat for MAGA. And the MSM tends to respond with quick judgments of a “split decision,” which is very misleading.

Benjamin Hart3:20 PM

yep. haven’t seen TOO much of that since the election, to be fair. but back to the actual gains made by dems, which it’s easy to lose track of amid the hundreds of results. what do you think was their most important victory other than winning the House? for me, it might have been knocking off scott walker in wisconsin.

Ed Kilgore3:23 PM

Guess it depends on your interpretation of “important.” If you mean “soul-satisfying for progressives,” then yeah, finally taking down the guy who had most consistently applied the worst kind of conservative policies to a previously progressive state was a very big deal.

Sweeping Orange County, California’s congressional seats was another big deal emotionally, particularly for those of us old enough to remember O.C. as a John Birch Society hotbed.

From a more practical point of view, all those congressional wins mattered–first, as part of a House takeover, and second, as a foundation for (maybe) a Dem reconquest of the Senate in 2020.

And the gubernatorial and state legislative gains will help with the next round of redistricting, though there’s some unfinished business on that front in 2020.

As I’ve argued at some length, even some losses were important for Dems–particularly the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Texas Senate race. They showed that finally “national Democrats” (including African-Americans) can do better in the former Confederacy than Blue Dogs–at least in states with the requisite combination of a large minority vote and some upscale suburbs.

Benjamin Hart3:29 PM

yes, and that may also have big repercussion in terms of what kind of candidate democrats want to nominate in 2020

Ed Kilgore3:30 PM

Well, it certainly reinforces the idea that there’s a “sunbelt strategy” for 2020 that could work as an alternative to Democrats obsessing about the Rust Belt states Trump carried.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right – arizona and georgia really could be in play

and, of course, florida

Ed Kilgore3:31 PM

And North Carolina.

Benjamin Hart3:31 PM

right.

so, all in all, a democratic party that is somewhat addicted to being traumatized should be feeling pretty good

Ed Kilgore3:35 PM

Yeah. There were some painful near-misses, but not really much grounds for a struggle-for-the-soul-of-the-party thing. That’s good, since Democrats will need all their energy to winnow their 40-candidate presidential field.

A Florida elections expert digs into what went wrong for Democrats on Tuesday

This election was the third consecutive Governor’s race decided by a point or less, bracketing two consecutive Presidential elections decided by a point. This drives homes two points: One, Florida, for all its dynamic growth and demographic changes, is very stable; and Two, when organizations like Quinnipiac try to peddle off polls showing candidates in Florida with 6-point leads, or 9-point leads, you now know what to do with that information (a post/rant on public polling is coming soon).

There are a lot of reasons why Florida is very competitive…but it is what it is. Big chunks of Florida cancel each other out, and both parties have large, and quite dug-in bases – and neither have a base that alone gets them to 50% + 1. Winning Florida (or losing it) is about managing the margins throughout Florida.

16 Democratic representatives signed a letter opposing Nancy Pelosi for House speaker … but she still has no announced challenger

… Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. One of the 16 signers, Ben McAdams (Utah), is now trailing Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah) and might never cast a speaker vote.

Not signing the letter is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), who has publicly opposed Pelosi and is now mulling a run against her. Fudge said Friday she would not make a final decision on whether to run until next week at the earliest.

Another five Democrats — Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) and Reps.-elect Jason Crow (Colo.), Jared Golden (Maine), Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.) — have made firm statements saying they would not vote for Pelosi but did not sign the letter.

stacey abrams and andrew gillum both conceded their elections this weekend to their republican opponents after protracted post-election battle. realistically, did either of them have any other option but to call it quits?

Zak Cheney-Rice11:47 AM

I think with Gillum the outcome was more or less decided on election night. His race was always more of a long shot than Bill Nelson’s reelection bid — the other high-profile Florida contest that dragged on into last week — and was never as close as that one. But I think it’s important to note that Abrams was pretty intentional about not conceding, in the traditional sense. She basically said, in so many words, that Kemp’s victory would have to stand because she saw no other available legal recourse available. I think she knew her options included dragging this out longer, but also knew that, legally, there wasn’t much she could do to alter the outcome.

But she has said she will continue to pursue issues around election integrity in Georgia, and I think that will include several (more) legal challenges to Kemp’s win, or at least to the mechanisms that facilitated it

Benjamin Hart11:48 AM

yes, she did not praise kemp, and called his win “legal” but refused to say that he was “legitimate” when asked by jake tapper

Zak Cheney-Rice11:52 AM

Yeah the question of legitimacy seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks. There’s a Slate piece (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/georgia-stacey-abrams-brian-kemp-election-not-stolen.html) circulating today arguing that we shouldn’t describe the Georgia election as “stolen,” and the first reason listed is because it could lead more and more people to see American elections as illegitimate. But I think the cat is pretty far out the bag on that one. He’s out and running down the street. I live in Atlanta and there are piles of little cards littering the streets around Piedmont Park (the city’s Central Park equivalent) that read, “Stolen Votes.” There are many, many people who believe this election was ill-gotten. So yeah, I think it is fair to say this wasn’t a legitimate win by plenty of metrics.

I’m not sure what group — activist, political, or otherwise — created the cards, to be clear. But it expresses a widely held sentiment.

Benjamin Hart11:57 AM

yeah, I have to say I’ve been on the other side on that debate – while I think kemp is a dirty character and absolutely employed the underhanded tactics we’ve all heard about, “stolen” struck me as a rhetorical bridge too far, for the reasons that a) it’s an escalation that I’m not sure is useful in the wider context of institutional delegitimization that republicans are pushing and b) we don’t actually KNOW if kemp’s actions swung the election, though we can suspect they did. I’m interested to hear you say otherwise, though.

Zak Cheney-Rice12:07 PM

I think it’s a useful and accurate frame, but it definitely has a veneer of plausible deniability because so much of what goes into “stealing” these elections takes place long before election day. Brian Kemp can always point to the fact that he’s acting well within the law, but it’s important to note these are laws he and/or his party created, likely for this very purpose. If you disenfranchise more than a million people — often for quibbling bureaucratic irregularities — and do so in a way that pretty transparently targets those whose lives are already beset by instability and unpredictability around housing, transportation, and employment, you are essentially creating the electorate you want. In Republicans’ case, that electorate is one skewed toward maintaining white, and conservative, power, at the expense of black voters, young voters, and poor voters (all of which often overlap). So the question of “theft,” it seems to me, is purely rhetorical. In our technical, traditional understanding of elections, we would not necessarily describe elections that took place in the Jim Crow South as “stolen.” But if roughly half of the Jim Crow South’s electorate is either barred from voting outright or forced to navigate an insane labyrinth of inconveniences, barriers, and sometimes outright violence to cast their ballots, it’s a stretch to describe that as legitimate, either.

That is, of course, a matter of differing scale. But it doesn’t take much to tip an election like Kemp-Abrams.

Also, it’s not our job as voters to keep falsely believing our elections are “legitimate” when clearly, in several key ways, the evidence suggests otherwise.

That distinction is earned.

Benjamin Hart12:12 PM

all good and useful points. but I do think the phraseology matters. would you say that the florida election was stolen because of the state’s disenfranchisement of felons?

Zak Cheney-Rice12:24 PM

It does matter, I think, but I haven’t found any of the arguments that dismiss such phrasing as extreme, or bemoan how it sows mistrust in our systems, to be especially convincing. I do believe that locking up black people at disproportionate rates, then ensuring they cannot vote even after they’ve done time, is doing the same work that racist voter suppression does by all the means listed above. It is stealing their right to vote, plain and simple. I think we can have a nuanced discussion about whether that means elections are being “stolen” outright or not (I tend to lean toward yes) but at the end of the day I think the more pressing issue is that we are building our democracy by ensuring people who should be able to vote cannot, and that we perhaps need more urgent language to describe the actual stakes there.

The California union that provided major funding for successful ballot campaigns to expand Medicaid in three red states this year is already looking for where to strike next to expand Obamacare coverage in the Donald Trump era.

Leaders of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West declined to identify which states they might target in 2020. But the six remaining states where Medicaid could be expanded through the ballot are on the group’s radar: Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming.

NEW: CNN asks court for an emergency hearing Monday afternoon, as the White House still plans to boot CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, despite court order that reinstated the journalist. https://t.co/vrmtazbgcI

JUST IN: Sens. Blumenthal, Whitehouse and Hirono file lawsuit challenging President Trump’s appointment of Acting AG Whitaker, arguing the appointment is unconstitutional because Whitaker was not in Senate-confirmed post.

New: “The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce that Ron Chernow, one of the most eminent biographers of American presidents and statesmen, will be the featured speaker at its annual dinner on Saturday, April 27, 2019.” History and First Amendment theme.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

The traditional news media amplify his words for a variety of reasons, including newsworthiness (he is, after all, the president), easy ratings (cable-news audiences have soared in his term), and old-fashioned peer pressure (the segment producer’s lament: “If everybody else is carrying Trump, shouldn’t we?”).

But a virus doesn’t just borrow a host’s cellular factory to reproduce; it often destroys the host in the process. The traditional news media are thoroughly infected by the Trump virus. It is not only spreading the disease of the president’s lies, but also suffering from a demise in public trust—at least among one half of the electorate.